Members of Raleigh’s Buen Pastor Church are fighting and praying to stop the deportation of twenty-six of its congregants. The church group was travelling together back to North Carolina after attending a religious retreat when Customs & Border Protection (CBP) pulled over three church vans in Louisiana.

Some forty-five congregants were transported to the CBP processing office – at least half of them young U.S. citizen children. While there, the group was subjected to religious taunts and the congregants’ repeated requests to call a lawyer were denied. The children spent six to eight hours on the floor, without food or drink. At the end of the process, adults were told that if they refused to sign the papers, they would be deported, and the United States would “keep” the children, putting them into orphanages.

SCSJ has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to seek CBP records about the stop and arrest. In immigration court, SCSJ will file a Motion to Suppress Evidence & Terminate Proceedings based on CBP’s constitutional, statutory, and regulatory violations.

As part of the evidence for SCSJ’s suppression of removal case — which demands that the government drop the original case — SCSJ is calling on churches with strong a Latino and immigrant base to express their outrage about the Buen Pastor stop.

Attached below is a letter to download which you can sign and return to SCSJ. The letters will then be submitted alongside a legal brief to show the impact of racial profiling in immigrant and Latino communities.